‘Soul’: Affecting Look at Street Basketball and Life

First “Hoop Dreams,” now “Soul in the Hole.” What is it about basketball that makes it the source of excellent documentary films?

Partially it’s the game itself, fluid, swirling, quintessentially visual. To watch the spectacular no-look passes and the all-but-indescribable moves to the hoop featured in “Soul” is to understand why it has so many passionate followers.

While “Hoop Dreams” concentrated on two players trying to make their mark in organized high school and college ball, “Soul” focuses on the more harum-scarum world of New York City street basketball, where the game tends to be flashier, the players more individualistic as well as occasionally more personally troubled.

Set during a recent summer so hot, as a radio DJ puts it, “I saw the devil on a bed with a fan,” “Soul” follows one particular team, Kenny’s Kings of the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, as it competes in the self-contained universe of the summer game, playing in intense tournaments like “It’s a Fila Thing,” “The Mecca” and the one that gives the film its name.

The on-court star of Kenny’s Kings is Ed Smith, universally known as Booger, an uncommonly talented guard with skills so dazzling that Sports Illustrated featured him on its cover last year as “King of the Streets,” describing a wizard who “controls the ball as if it were secretly hooked to his hand and couldn’t possibly get away.”

But it’s more than the flash of the game that makes street basketball so intoxicating and this film so involving. It’s the knowledge of the poverty and emotional destitution these players often come from and are always in danger of returning to. It’s the understanding of how street ball becomes a reason to believe because it gives players and spectators the chance to be taken out of themselves, to soar literally and metaphorically. Since the downside is so abrupt and chilling for those who aren’t able to use basketball to change their lives, this game is more life and death than sports usually are.

Trying to help his players survive in their world is the coach and namesake of Kenny’s Kings, Kenny Jones. Though his own livelihood as a liquor store clerk is problematical, Jones and his wife Ronnet work to create a surrogate family for the young players he coaches. Hot-tempered and insistently profane, Jones is hardly a classic role model, but he cares about these kids, and one of the things “Soul” demonstrates is how much can be accomplished by one man who simply cares.

The drama of “Hole in the Soul” is two-fold: Will Kenny’s Kings get through the summer undefeated and will Kenny Jones be able to keep his star player on an even keel and away from the myriad dangers of life on the streets that has a fatal attraction for Booger Smith?

Men with two more different styles would be hard to imagine. Jones is a bulldog, forceful and confrontational, always speaking his mind. Booger, though confident and charismatic, is quieter, someone who glides through his life like he glides on the court while nurturing his own particular dreams. “If I don’t make it to the NBA, I’m gonna be a drug dealer,” he says at the start of the film. “Somehow I’ve gotta get me a Lexus. Whatever it takes.”

Making their relationship more complex than the average player-coach dynamic is that 18-year-old Booger, estranged from his mother and with no contact with his father, has lived with the Jones family for the past three years, making Kenny Jones the closest thing to a parent he’s ever had.

Jones has few delusions about Booger: “Ninety-nine percent of the time he’s lying,” he says of his charge. “The other 1% he’s asleep.” Yet despite--or maybe because of no one else caring about this kid--Jones became determined to “civilize him as much as possible,” a goal that leads to “Soul in the Hole’s” most affecting moments.

Director Danielle Gardner and producer Lilibet Foster hung out in New York’s playgrounds and neighborhoods for years working on this film, and that time paid off. Because its documentary style is completely nonjudgmental, “Soul in the Hole” creates a strong sense of street verisimilitude. It doesn’t judge or psychoanalyze. It focuses on the ambience of the street game as much as on the players. “Soul” places us firmly in this unforgiving world, and it’s one we won’t forget.

* Unrated. Times guidelines: considerable profanity and intense crowd situations and confrontations.

‘Soul in the Hole’

An Asphalt Films production, released by Northern Arts Entertainment. Director Danielle Gardner. Producer Lilibet Foster. Cinematographer Paul Gibson. Editor Melissa Neidich. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.

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